Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  The chance of a fortune had rubbed shoulders with him and passed on!

  He didn't feel resentful in the slightest, explaining at convincing length that you couldn't blame Shuishui for this, you could only blame his own mistaken understanding. He was too stupid, too, too stupid! It turned out he'd forgotten that the first line of The East is Red is "The East is red," but the second is "the sun rises"-its notation was 1162 exactly!

  As he was telling me this, his face darkened, his voice convulsed with groans.

  Confronted with this editor who believed so deeply in Shuishui, I realized the significance of the term "dream-woman": although people normally seen as remote from learning and reason (children, women, the insane, and so on) were mostly regarded as pitiful weaklings, at key, fateful moments they would suddenly become the people who were closest to truth, who were the most trustworthy and reliable.

  I'm perfectly ready to admit that knowledge and reason are certainly not able to resolve all life's problems. But I'm still surprised at how much stronger the forces that reject knowledge and reason are than we often think. A long time ago now, the Austrian thinker Sigmund Freud used his study of psychoanalysis to produce a precise and systematic theoretical account of this. He had doubts about the power of reason and little belief even in consciousness, placing greater emphasis on the role of the unconscious; he believed that the confusion, the triviality, the secrecy of the unconscious were not lacking in their own significance. Quite the opposite, in fact: as the source and impetus of consciousness, the unconscious concealed a yet more important truth requiring careful exploration.

  Freud believed that the unconscious emerged most often in children, women, the insane, and even more frequently in dreams-namely, wherever reason is in a weakened or collapsed condition. An expert in the explanation of dreams, this psychoanalyst wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. In his opinion, dreams marked the veiled emergence of the unconscious, were the most important point of entry into research on mental illness. No doubt he would be happily surprised to learn of the term Maqiao people used for a crazy female: dream-woman. He would also no doubt be able to understand the contradictory attitude that Maqiao people adopted toward dream-women: one of pity, at times when logical behavior produced results, but also of veneration, at times when the secrets of heaven's will were unfathomable.

  The word "dream-woman" concisely and accurately summarized Freud's discoveries: dreams are the deepest repositories of normal people's insanity, and mental illness is a state of awakened, daytime dreaming.

  The particular status of "dream-women" in Maqiao seems to support the crucial standpoint of anti-intellectualism: in Maqiao, this most unscientific of places, was concealed an even more abstruse science.

  I don't know whether other languages carry this implication too. The etymological root of the word "lunatic" in English is "luna," namely "moon." Crazy people, in other words, are moon people. The moon only comes out at night, which of course is already close to dream-time. Readers will no doubt recall that Shuishui's spells of mental illness invariably occurred between dusk and nightfall, always against the backdrop of oil lamps or moonlight. Perhaps knowledge or intellect requires clarity, can't survive so easily in hazy darkness. Perhaps moonlight is the natural inducer of mental illness (the first implication of dream-woman) and of divinity (the second implication of dream-woman). Someone who loves moonlight, who loves above all to stare at moonlight or walk under the moonlight, whose behavior is poetic or dreamlike, is already wandering at the margins of the familiar world, possesses abnormal mental tendencies.

  By this reckoning, all mental hospitals should consider moonlight the most dangerous of contagions.

  By the same logic, all religious institutions, all absolute faiths and forms of consciousness that transcend science should consider moonlight to be the highest form of enlightenment.

  *Stick(y)

  (Ma): I searched through every dictionary I could find, including A Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects (Jiangsu Educational Publishing House), without managing to find the character I was looking for. The dictionary meaning of the character [g$] that in the end I reluctantly used for this word was "to tease or pester," which is not so very far from the sense I wanted to express. This character is pronounced "man," only slightly different from the "nia" I was looking for-I hope readers can remember this.

  Nia, meaning "to stick" or "sticky," is often used as a dirty word. Maybe it's because of this that dictionaries for gentlemen, dictionaries for campuses and libraries, dictionaries that adults keep in hardback in their sitting rooms, all based on lofty linguistic ethics, have to ignore it, or at best lightly pass over it, or stick to hazy generalizations. But in real life, where Maqiao people live, nia is a word in constant use. Very often, people would use the word tens, even hundreds of times in one day- they didn't live by the dictionaries in general circulation.

  Nia has many different uses in Maqiao:

  1. Pronounced in second tone, nia means to stick. For example, when sealing an envelope, they'd say "nia the envelope properly." Of the thick, sticky quality of glue or paste, they'd say "really nia" or "good and nia" Magnetic rock is "nia (sticky) rock." A snot-nose is "nia."

  2. Pronounced in first tone, nia means intimacy, affection, pestering, skin pressed against hair-sticky. To "get nia" means to be actively intimate and affectionate with others. To "act nia" means to entice others, by expression or manner, to be intimate and affectionate, implying a passive mode of behavior. These phrases are often used for relations between parents and children, between men and women. When a young girl is in the passionate throes of a romance, she is always "very nia" towards her man; her tone of voice, the look in her eyes, and so on, all remind people of the quality of glue or paste.

  3. In third tone, nia means to make fun of, tease, bother, and so on, not far in meaning from "provoke." For example, "don't nia trouble," "don't nia a quarrel." Maqiao people also have a saying about "Three People You Don't Nia": the young, the old, and beggars. They mean that these three kinds of people are very tricky to handle, that it's best not to have any dealings with them, let alone cross swords with them; even if you're in the right, the only thing to do is give in and run far, far away.

  This is the same attitude people have towards glue and paste: they're afraid that once stuck, disengaging will prove difficult and they'll find themselves in a very sticky situation. Despite the many ways in which nia is used, a common seam of meaning clearly runs through them all, they all share a linguistic point of intersection.

  4. In fourth tone, nia (to stick) means the heterosexual sex act. Northern dialects contain similar words, such as cao, screw, for example. This word was brought down south, to Maqiao, by soldiers and itinerant workers men from the north.

  In fact, this northern cao [i^r] appears to be rather different from nia. Firstly, the shape of the character-a human radical on top, meat radical on the bottom-indicates that it's a male act; that it should have a crisp, brisk, forceful pronunciation is entirely fitting. Ma, however, is pronounced with slow, lingering softness, implying an act of gentleness. Bearing in mind the original meaning of nia, or at least the meanings linked with it, a state of nia, or sticking,naturally indicates a kind of adhesion, of close contact, intertwining, intimacy, teasing, a state reminiscent of glue or paste, lacking any violent, aggressive quality.

  Almost all physiological surveys so far carried out confirm that females reach a state of sexual excitement much more slowly than males and that females often require a certain degree of tenderness before they can be aroused. This is a first-tone nia, second-tone nia, and third-tone nia kind of process, of which males need to be aware and to which they need to adjust. This leads me to a bold hypothesis: the word nia suits the particularities of the female physiology better than cao, is preferred by women. If such a thing as a female language exists in this world, the former word will be far more widely used than the latter in their sexual vocabulary.

  A women's book has bee
n discovered in Jiangyong County in Hunan Province, written in language that would only circulate and be used among women, thus attracting a great deal of attention from feminists. I do still strongly doubt that an independent female language could exist. But when you consider that even today many traces of matriarchal society still remain in the South, that historically the South developed into a male-dominated society one step behind the North, then female physiology and psychology may in fact find fuller expression in southern languages. I'd like to see nia as one proof of this bold hypothesis.

  *Low (and X-Ray Glasses)

  : Low, low-down, low doings: the etymological origins of this word lie in sexual behavior of a deviant, or even perfectly normal nature. Since the 1980s, Hunanese dialect has referred to hooliganism by the phrase "lowlife," obviously an extension and expansion of the word "low." In terms of the design of the human body, the head is positioned on top, and so human thought and spirit have always appeared uplifted, have enjoyed symbolic status as "lofty," "sublime," "metaphysical"; sexual organs, however, are positioned down below, and so sexual behavior has always been termed "low."

  Thinking about it like this, it becomes very hard to say that it's merely an accident of choice that temples are built on high mountains, criminals are imprisoned in hell, aristocrats live in high palaces, commoners kneel at the foot of steps, the victor's flag is raised aloft in the sky, the loser's flag is trampled underfoot… Surely all this must be the externalization, the product of some form of belief. I suspect all this started with cave-dwellers, with their sense of bemusement towards and earliest knowledge of their own bodies; from this time on, temples, aristocrats, and victors' flags all served as extensions of the heads of cave-dwellers, all became thus uplifted. And anything opposite to this was forever relegated down below, to the shameful ranks of the lower body.

  Apparently, Maqiao used to be particularly low, and only became more upright after brutal rectification by the commune cadres. After arriving in the village, Mr. He the Commune Head not only took over any private land, manure, chickens, ducks, and so on that exceeded the permitted quota, he also at one large meeting produced a strange object made up of two long tubes with lenses inside: "What are these, you ask? X-ray glasses! With these, I can see every single low-down thing you get up to! If I catch someone, I'll punish 'em! Catch ten, punish ten! No mercy!"

  These, in fact, were binoculars belonging to the Commune Forestry station, used to watch for mountain fires.

  Hearing this, even Benyi started to look anxious, directing one troubled glance after another at the binoculars. Afterwards, people no longer dared speak or act indiscreetly, for months not one filthy word slipped from Wanyu's mouth-you could beat him to death before you'd get a qoqo song out of him. When evening came, everyone went early to bed and all fell perfectly quiet in the village, every lamp left unlit. Many people said they didn't even dare touch their wives during that time.

  Wanyu had been deeply upset about the X-ray glasses: "It's unfair, it's so unfair," he once complained to me. "You city people have films to watch, zoos to visit, cars and trains to look at-what do we country people have? This is the only cultural life we have,"-he was referring to his qoqo songs and to goings-on between men and women-"using X-ray glasses, now, what's the world coming to! And another thing, if the Communist Party doesn't let everyone do low stuff, how's there going to be a little Communist Party later on?"

  I won't consider right now whether or not Wanyu's complaints about Commune Head He were justified. I will say, though, that it isn't historically correct to view sexual conservatism, as represented by the binoculars, as a speciality of the Communist Party. When the Guomindang (GMD) ruled China, it so happened that the military governments of Guangzhou, Wuhan, and other places too prohibited ballroom dancing, regarding it as a form of licentiousness "harmful to social morals and mores." And earlier than this, when China was ruled by the Qing dynasty, The Romance of the Western Chamber was right at the top of the list of forbidden operas, and love stories and poems were all officially viewed as "works of evil filth," with pile after pile rooted out, confiscated, and burned. The word "low," still in use by Maqiao people, likewise has a long history as a moral prejudice against sexual behavior, and forms part of a single thread that has permeated Chinese linguistic thinking for several thousand years. As long as this name, "low," remains unchanged or unexpunged, people will always have difficulty in truly, totally, thoroughly walking out from under the shadow of prejudice. Even if Commune Head He had been an exceptionally open and enlightened individual, he wouldn't necessarily have been able to shake off a mindset that was as much a part of him as his own flesh and blood. He was just a traditional dictionary user, wielding his binoculars, coasting along the track of a given meaning; like a donkey on a halter, he could do nothing other than move forwards. In this sense, then, do people produce words, or words produce people? Was Commune Head He indeed responsible for his implacable strictness, or was it this word "low" that way back in the past had become a halter for Commune Head He-in that case, then, should all users of Chinese, including Maqiao people, be held responsible for Commune Head He? This, of course, is a question.

  *He-Ground (and She-Field)

  :When Maqiao people were working on the land, their favorite type of conversation, apart from food talk, was low talk. The endless variety of low talk would make your eyes pop, jaw drop, mind blow, thoughts wander, make the heavens spin, the earth turn, and the sun and moon darken. Nothing, not even the most ordinary of things-radishes, ploughs, carrying poles, caves, birds in flight, grain mortars, grassland, ovens-failed to invite low associations for them, anything could become an excuse or an analogy for lowness, could provide justification for the endless repetition (with minor alterations) of jokes and stories, could detonate rallies of raucous laughter. It was during the planting season in particular that their crude rantings got wilder than ever. She pants to catch me

  Runs to catch me-I'm like a wet loach,

  Loaches love their rice gruel

  Squeezing into slippery wet rice gruel…

  At planting time, a song like this was counted as really quite refined. Singing this stuff wasn't normally allowed, it was prohibited by the government, but it was encouraged in the planting season and cadres turned a deaf ear. Wanyu said this was called "soiling the ground"-and the lower you went, the better. Unsoiled ground was dead ground, cold ground, ground that wouldn't produce shoots or allow seeds to take root.

  Maqiao people saw "ground" as distinct from "fields": ground was "male," fields were "female." Ground had to be sown by women, whereas fields, of course, had to be sown by men. Both these stipulations had an important part to play in guaranteeing bumper harvests. Rice seedlings were to be planted in the fields, so the job of immersing them in water inevitably had to be done by men, and it was strictly taboo for women even to stand by and look.

  By the same logic, a greater degree of sexual immodesty amongst women when they were on the ground was temporarily permitted and became entirely proper, enjoyed a kind of tacit approval. This wasn't just a type of diversion: it was a struggle for production, a sacred mission to be carried out with the loftiest sense of responsibility. Some female Educated Youth couldn't get used to it, couldn't hide their feelings of embarrassment and aversion on encountering it; their frowning and blocking of their ears so disheartened the local women that they couldn't get any "soiling" done; the men would then get anxious and make the team cadre transfer the female Educated Youth to work elsewhere.

  I've seen with my own eyes the savagery of women on the ground, how they dragged a young man to one side, for example, how everyone pitched in to pull down his pants and throw balls of ox dung down his crotch to teach him a lesson, then scattered with roars of laughter. They wouldn't have treated Educated Youth like this, of course, but lesser instances of harassment were quite common, stealing and sitting on a grass hat, for example, followed by a volley of guffaws; or calling you over to make you guess the answer to a
riddle, followed by a volley of guffaws. Ill at ease, you couldn't clearly make out what the riddle was, but you could tell from their mad laughter that this riddle didn't need to be answered, and could never, ever be answered.

  * Menstrual Holes

  : Fields were maternal, female, and so the holes where water flowed in the ridges between fields were called "menstrual holes." Humans have menstrual leaks, or menstruation as it's more standardly termed, so it's perfectly natural that fields should also have menstrual holes. Depending on the irrigation needs of the seedlings in the fields, the water level needed to be adjusted whenever necessary by blocking up or digging open each menstrual hole; this was the duty of the water regulators. Normally it was old people who took on this job, solitary figures roaming around the ridges with a hoe on their shoulders; sometimes you heard the intermittent pad-pad-pad of their footsteps in the depths of the night, each one sounding out with a particular, crisp clarity, one clattering pebble after another rising up out of an insomniac night.

  There were always small puddles by these menstrual holes where water sprang forth, sometimes there were even small fish struggling desperately against the water-flow; this was where people could easily wash and scrub themselves when work stopped for the day. If women couldn't face going to the river, which was a long way away, they'd stop to wash their hoes or sickles if they passed by one of these holes; while they were about it they'd wash their hands and feet, wash away the mud and sweat from their faces; one after another, they'd wash back into view a shining face and bright eyes before they walked off toward the cooking smoke of the evening. Once they'd passed the menstrual holes, they were transformed. Their brightness tarnished by a whole day of overwork, it was only on their way back home that the gurgling flow of water from the menstrual hole suddenly restored their radiance.